


me, you, and the multiverse

by wishbonetea



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: (like seriously i go a little overboard with the academia), AFTG Exchange, Academia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, And there was only one office, Canon-Typical Backgrounds, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Fem!Andreil, Trans Aaron Minyard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24541006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishbonetea/pseuds/wishbonetea
Summary: Ray Minyard was content to finish her PhD without the drama of her undergrad years. She had two friends, a twin brother who didn't talk to her, and an office to call her own. She didn't need or want anything else.Enter: Talia Josten⁂A fem!andreil college au for @helplesshobo.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 60
Kudos: 133
Collections: AFTG Exchange Spring 2020





	me, you, and the multiverse

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Leah for organising the spring exchange this year! I had a lot of fun with these prompts, even if I was aiming for 5k minimum.... anyone who knows my writing will know this is a challenge I can probably never meet.
> 
> I've changed the formatting for this fic but if you prefer AO3's default of san-serif type and left-aligned text just click "Hide Creator's Style" at the top of the page.
> 
> And just a side note that I have written Ray (Andrew) and Talia (Neil) as cisgender women. As someone who I identifies as cis, it's not my place to write from the perspective of a trans woman, and obviously there's a lot of issues with a cis writer making a canon male character into a trans female character. Having said that, Aaron is trans in this fic and the scenes involving him have been sensitivity read. Huge thank you to Fig for that, I love you.
> 
> And if anyone has any thoughts or comments about this or anything else I'm v open to feedback so you can drop a comment here or message me on [tumblr](https://wishbonetea.tumblr.com)

**me, you, and the multiverse**

_There is a parallel world under this one where everyone of us is real._  
— Alice Notley, _Alma, or the Dead Woman_

* * *

* * *

**R** ay was on her third cup of coffee when she received the email.

For the most part, she didn’t read her emails. She didn’t see the point. If someone needed to tell her something, they knew where her office was and presumably understood how a phone worked. If they didn’t know where her office was, or they didn’t know her number, then the message couldn’t be that important. No one came to her with gossip.

But Ray had fallen asleep at her desk the night before, and was subsequently locked inside the Angelou Building. It wasn’t the first time, and if her thesis had anything to do with it, it wouldn’t be the last. But staying in her office all night was considerably more pleasant when she was asleep. Being woken up at four in the morning by a series of fire engines driving through campus had piqued Ray’s sleep deprived and caffeine driven curiosity.

If she wasn’t able to perfectly recall typing in her password when she set up the account two years ago, she was certain she would have forgotten what it was. But Ray did remember, as she remembered everything she had ever seen, and typed in _this is a word we use to plug holes with_ when prompted. She had to wait a couple minutes for the several thousand emails to load. Once they had, she deleted everything older than a day, until there were only four emails remaining. It didn’t take long to find the one she was looking for.

According to the university’s president, Charles Whittier, the Ramanujan Building had undergone a series of unfortunate events. Two weeks ago the boiler in the Math department had broken. Palmetto State being Palmetto State, nothing had yet been done to fix it. One of the students had brought in a plug-in electric heater, which caught fire after being left switched on overnight. This set off a faulty sprinkler system, so instead of targeting particular areas, every single sprinkler in the building _outside_ of the affected area had been activated. The entire building was now flooded, and one floor burnt to a crisp.

Ray felt neither pity for the now displaced students, nor amusement at their misfortune. She didn’t feel anything at all. She looked down at her empty mug and the way the words on her laptop screen started to blur, and realised that okay, she felt a little tired. It wasn’t anything coffee could’t fix, as long as she didn’t fall asleep at her desk again.

On her way to the communal kitchen, she overheard Wymack and Abby’s voices filtering through the hallway.

“Who’s in today?” Wymack asked, since it was the end of December and most of the building’s staff were at home spending time with their families.

“Kevin’s in,” Abby said, and then she looked over Wymack’s shoulder to see Ray coming down the hallway. “Oh, hello, Ray,” she said, offering her a warm smile that Ray didn’t return. Abby looked back to Wymack. “Ray’s in.”

Wymack turned around to acknowledge Ray’s appearance, though Wymack and Ray both knew that her being in the building was of little significance to anyone; she was a PhD student who taught one evening class that tended to be undersubscribed as it ran alongside more popular classes taught by more qualified tutors.

It was why Ray was surprised when Wymack nodded as if seeing her today was part of his plan.

“My office in five,” he said, and then took off further down the hallway in the direction of the aforementioned room.

Ray watched Wymack disappear into his office, and then flicked her gaze back to Abby. Abby rarely buckled under her stare, which was something Ray appreciated. Still, Ray ignored her and headed in the direction of the kitchen. She assumed that she’d done something, or was currently being blamed for something she didn’t do, and she didn’t have the energy to deal with either until a cup of hot, sweet, milky coffee was nestled between her hands.

When she opened the milk she found the communal supermarket-brand milk that the other staff on the third floor pitched in for, and the organic, creamy milk that Kevin tended to. He tended to leave messages on the carton like _K. Day_ and _do not use_ and _not for Ray._ Doing the complete opposite of what Kevin has asked of her was one of the few joys in Ray’s life. She liked to ignore him or tell him no, and to watch as he blustered into one of his rages where he muttered curses in French and pinned passive aggressive memos on the staff kitchen noticeboard.

Ray sniffed at Kevin’s milk and poured herself a generous helping into her cactus themed mug. _CAN’T TOUCH THIS,_ the cactus said. It had been a gift from Nicky, and Ray tended to hide it whenever he came over to visit, but otherwise used it more often than the other mugs she had collected over the years.

Coffee in hand, Ray headed down to Wymack’s office. Unorganised stacks of papers and empty coffee cups littered all surfaces, and it was a wonder that Kevin was related to this man at all.

Wymack was sitting behind the desk, but had swivelled his chair away from the computer so his view of Ray was unobstructed. Ray slurped loudly at her coffee, but he didn’t react due to years of exposure to Ray’s general disregard to authority figures.

“I’ll cut to the chase, Minyard,” he started. “With what happened last night all heads of department have agreed to provide temporary office accommodation for the members of staff who’ve had to leave the Ramanujan Building. We’ve agreed to take three. Two are going to have to share the Interview Room and one’s going to come in with you since you’re the only one with an office to yourself. I’d prepared a speech to talk you into it but I suppose it’ll be faster to ask what you want for it.”

Ray stared back at him in calm silence while she worked out what she wanted from him. It would have to be more than just whiskey to coax her into sharing the only warm and comfortable space she had.

“I want your parking space for the rest of the year,” she said. “And I get to choose who I’m sharing with.”

Wymack nodded. “Done.” He leaned over and rifled through one of the piles of paper on his desk for a few moments. Eventually he pulled a sheet out and gave it a look over. He needed to invest in a pair of reading glasses; he kept tromboning the paper as if that would make the small text any clearer. “There’s a math history lecturer, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematical cosmology, and an administrative assistant.”

Ray wasn’t going to have a historian in her office. She got enough of an earful from Kevin as it was, and she wouldn’t be playing messenger everytime Kevin got a hard-on over the origin of mathematical thought. And she wasn’t going to share with an admin assistant either. She knew how much that relied on phone calls, and Ray favoured the quiet too much. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate with someone yapping away on the other side of the room, and she wouldn’t keep her knives to herself if she wasn’t able to concentrate. Listening to the campus radio while she worked was different to someone having an actual conversation around her. A radio you could turn off without having to resort to threats.

“I’ll take the math grad,” she said.

Wymack nodded and wrote something on the sheet of paper. “There. Not so hard, was it?”

Ray flipped him off as she rose from her chair but didn’t see the point in responding aloud.

“Someone will come down later and bring in another desk and some more shelving,” Wymack continued as if Ray had replied.

Ray ignored this and didn’t bother to point out that there wasn’t room in her office for more shelves. She left the door open on her way back to her office since she knew it annoyed Wymack. It was the small things in life that brought her snapshots of rare pleasure.

* * *

**R** ay was reading a paper about Walt Whitman’s poetry when she heard someone walking down the hallway. At this end of the floor there was only her office and Kevin’s, but Kevin was currently on a self-directed field trip to Virginia with Jean and Jeremy. The footsteps were meant for her. She turned off the radio in preparation, and pretended to look busier than she actually was. She didn’t get up to answer the door when the owner of the footsteps knocked.

“Ray?” came Dan’s voice. “We have the desk.”

Ray decided that getting up and opening the door required less energy than opening her mouth and speaking. She held the door open wide enough for Dan and Boyd to carry in the wooden desk. It was one of those old writing desks, where the table top could be lifted to reveal a compartment underneath. It had ink stains in the corner, beside a small indent for an ink pot.

Ray wanted it.

She let Dan and Boyd navigate her office, and waited for them to set the desk down. Ray didn’t care where; she was going to move it to where her own desk (steel legs, white glass top) currently sat, perched beside the window in the corner of the room with the chair’s back to the wall and facing the door.

Unfortunately, neither Dan or Boyd left immediately after dropping off the desk. Dan set her hands on her hips as she surveyed the room, and Boyd started to plug in the ancient desktop computer on Ray’s new desk-to-be.

“Well,” Dan eventually said. “We’re not gonna fit any more shelves in here.”

She said this like this would come as a surprise to them, as if there weren’t already bookcases lining every available wallspace. The only way Dan would fit another bookcase in Ray’s office was if she planted one in the middle of the floor. Ray wouldn’t have hated that; it would act as a screen between the two desks, dividing both inhabitants until Ray had her office all to herself once more.

Dan’s solution was much worse; Ray was to move some of her things from the existing storage space to make room for the parasite. Ray decidedly hated democracy; just because she hadn’t bothered to put in her vote for the ‘Angelou Building Representative’ didn’t mean she wanted to put up with the consequences of the others’ poor decision making.

Ray was about to tell Dan to fuck off and kick her and her boyfriend out, but Wymack stepped in through the open door.

“How’s it looking?” he asked.

“No room for more shelves,” Boyd summarised.

Wymack looked around then nodded. He turned to Ray, who was already starting to regret not going home as soon as the building was unlocked. If she hadn’t been here, perhaps she could have put this all off until the Ramanujan staff were housed elsewhere.

“Box up some of your stuff,” Wymack told her.

“I need all of it,” Ray lied.

“Bullshit. You’ve memorised all of this crap.” He waved a hand around to gesture all the books on the shelves. “I’m sure you can survive with them in boxes for a little while.”

Ray stared at him blankly, but Wymack was infuriatingly patient. “Fine,” she said.

Eventually they left, only coming back a little while later to drop off several cardboard boxes and disappearing again to sort out the Interview Room at the other end of the floor.

Ray wasted a good half-hour spinning around in her chair staring aimlessly at the ceiling before getting started on her books.

Wymack had been right when he said she had them all memorised, but she still liked to leaf through them, and copying up references was still easier when she had the text laid out in front of her rather than having to visualise a whole page of text in her mind. She started to pull out the books she hadn’t used in a while since they weren’t relevant to her thesis, and she found them dusty from being on the shelves for so long. It wasn’t an efficient method of clearing the bookcases, she knew, since she kept stopping to touch the pages and read the odd line here and there.

The ones she did place into the boxes were the literature classics she had multiple copies of, and the different editions of translated books. There were a few expensive editions of books with green leather spines and thick, pulpy rag paper that still seemed to contain tiny bits of tree. They went in the box too, in caution for what her unknown office-mate could do to them. Ray wanted them on her side of the room.

Still, even after packing away everything she thought she wouldn’t need, she’d only filled two of the six boxes she’d been given. The shelf space she’d now cleared was minimal at best.

Ray supposed that a math student wouldn’t have as many books as Ray did. She had dropped math at school as soon as she was able to, and she remembered the two text books she’d had to have for classes but it wasn’t like the entire backpack full of paperbacks required for English Literature.

She figured that was going to have to be enough whether her new office-mate liked it or not, and stacked the two boxes on top of each other and hefted them up into her arms. A moment later, Boyd appeared in the doorway again, carrying another empty cardboard box. Ray felt appreciative eyes on her arms and her skin started to crawl. Boyd was a puppy, but Ray was more of a cat person.

“I don’t need more,” she said, walking over to her desk and turning around to face him before setting the boxes down.

“Oh,” he said, shaking himself a little. “Dan said you’d need another.” He looked around at the newly vacated shelves and frowned a little. “Are you sure? Where else are you gonna put the rest of them.”

Ray ignored him. He could work out that she wasn’t going to move anymore, so she didn’t need to hold his hand and do the work for him. She sat back down at her desk and started spinning it slightly with one foot on the floor and the other resting on the edge of her chair. It was then that Boyd noticed Ray had claimed the new desk, and his frown deepened.

“I know it’s an inconvenience for you,” he started, “but the least you could do was clear out one bookcase. What are you expecting them to do? Just live out of a cardboard box?”

It wasn’t Ray who answered.

“I’ve lived in worse conditions,” the new voice said. Ray looked over to see a woman standing in the doorway, a small cardboard box in hand.

Ray gave her an assessing once over. The woman was short, though likely a little taller than she was, which wasn’t unusual. She was darker, too. While Ray was white with blonde hair, this woman was of ambiguous race but definitely not white. Her brown skin was freckled, and her auburn hair was half-tied back in a mass of curls that turned copper in the mid-afternoon sun. Ray felt her mouth dry a little, but looked back to her laptop in feigned disinterest. She couldn’t read the words on her screen.

“Who are you?” the woman asked Boyd. Her voice had an unplaceable accent, distinctly American but no particular state came to mind.

Ray saw Boyd hold his hand out to the woman out of the corner of her eye. “Matt Boyd. I’m in one of the offices down the hallway. Come over anytime if you need help with anything, or just want company.”

The woman ignored Boyd’s hand, but she still had the box in her hand so maybe she just didn’t want to struggle with it. It wasn’t clear whether she felt uncomfortable in Boyd’s company, but Ray knew as well as anyone how to mask discomfort.

“I’ll be fine. Thanks,” the woman said, and stepped toward Ray’s old desk. She set the box in the centre of it, and the sound was quiet enough to show that despite its small size, it was mostly empty. Ray couldn’t see over the sides, but nothing was piled up inside to overflow. When Ray had assumed that a math student wouldn’t require many books, she had still thought she’d have more than what this woman brought. Ray now knew she could have left more of her books on her shelves, and she planned to put several of them back.

“Okay,” Boyd said, rocking back on his feet for a second before leaving the room.

Ray felt eyes on her then, but she typed in a few words of gibberish before looking up to meet the woman’s gaze.

“Andrea Minyard?” she asked, and Ray sighed internally. Not only did she use her full, Tilda-given first name, but she pronounced it _An-drē-ə_ rather than _An-drā-ə._

“Ray,” Ray corrected.

After a beat, where she likely picked up on her error, the woman nodded. “Talia Josten,” she said, pronouncing her first name like _Tal-yā_ rather than the more popular _Tä-lē-ə._ Ray couldn’t help but recall a phonetics and etymology lecture she attended in her second year of her bachelor’s degree, and placed the name to be of Hebrew origin. Perhaps they shared the frustration borne of years of mispronunciation from school registers and doctors’ appointments.

Still, shared frustration wasn’t going to suddenly change the fact that Ray was now sharing her office with a complete stranger. It didn’t matter how pretty this stranger was, she was still unwanted. Ray didn’t let herself dwell on the fact she still checked her fingernail length when she started typing on her keyboard again. It didn’t matter what impression she gave off; Talia Josten was an inconvenience, and a fleeting one at that.

* * *

**T** alia Josten was a menace personally sent out to infuriate Ray. Ray wasn’t sure what she’d done to deserve it, other than the generalised act of being born that seemed to dictate the rest of the shit she’d had to live through.

It took only three days for Josten to settle both into Ray’s office and her bad graces. For one; Josten had moved her desk from where it faced the window to where it now faced Ray’s desk. Josten sat with her back to Ray’s bookcase, which housed the free shelves Ray had cleared out. She’d originally moved it so that her back was to the window, and faced the door, but then changed her mind when she’d tried to work on her computer during the day. Ray generally wouldn’t care where Josten sat, but the side-effect of facing each other was that neither of them could stare without the other noticing. And Josten stared. A lot. Ray didn’t so much _stare,_ as she assessed. Josten wasn’t much of a threat, but she was an invasion in her space and Ray didn’t like being caught unawares. So Ray looked up from her work more than she usually would, but that was to be expected. She would have done the same for anyone. Josten wasn’t special. Josten was nothing.

The second thing was the betrayal. Ray had never once considered the people who shared her floor her _friends,_ but she hadn’t expected them all to take to Josten so quickly. They’d keep knocking on Ray’s office door and invite Josten to the student union most nights, and then offer the same invite to Ray. They’d stopped inviting Ray to things early on during their first year together, and Ray didn’t appreciate how they thought that Josten had changed things. Like having forced company had warmed her up to seeking out more of it from others.

The third thing was that Josten believed she had much right to Ray’s space as Ray did. Unlike the students Ray had been paired with for group projects or shared desk space over the years, Josten didn’t skitter away. She asked Ray to turn down the volume of the radio Ray listened to while she worked, and held Ray’s gaze unflinching when Ray only blinked at her. 

Ray was considerably stubborn, and was quite set on holding Josten’s stare until winter came around again. Josten was stubborn too, but broke first. She asked again, including that dreaded word, and Ray only told her that she ‘didn’t like that word’. Ray had been surprised that there hadn’t been any follow up questions or, even worse, an ‘it’s just a word,’ but Josten had scowled in reluctant acceptance.

For all of two seconds.

Instead of backing down and getting used to the noise, she strode up to Ray’s desk, leaned over into Ray’s personal space, and twisted the volume dial. For some unknown reason, Ray let her. She didn’t let herself dwell on why, and dismissed it as curiosity. Josten had stayed there for a moment, one hand braced on Ray’s desk to hold herself up, and _smiled._ It was sharklike, slightly lopsided, and displayed a row of crooked teeth. Ray hadn’t noticed it until then, but Josten’s eyes were unbearably blue. They were cold too, an icy sort of anger compared to the bottomless, white-hot rage that burrowed deep in Ray’s chest.

Still, Ray made a point to turn on the radio as often as she could, even on the days that silence would have been preferable.

It was one of those days, two months later, when Ray kept squinting at her word document and tried to make the words in her thoughts louder and clearer than the aimless chatter of the radio hosts. It wasn’t working.

_“And that is why, dear listeners, you can both have your cake and eat it,”_ Alvarez said.

_“I still think there’s going to be a better solution out there,”_ Laila said. _“If anyone has any suggestions you can text us or go to our website at palmettostateradio.com.”_

There was a pause for a second, and then a song with a low bass started to filter through Ray’s speakers. There weren’t any lyrics for a while, so Ray managed to type a couple sentences before a quick-paced rap filled the room. At that point focusing on her thesis was next to impossible, but Ray wasn’t going to turn it off. It was a good song, and more importantly, it was the type of song Josten couldn’t solve math problems to. Ray couldn’t write either, but that was beside the point. Ray had never minded a little self-destruction along the way.

Ray pointedly ignored Josten, sitting at her desk opposite Ray and rotating between scribbling in her grid-format notebook and typing something on her computer. Ray forced her eyes away and tried to focus on the words in front of her. _Poetry is not about an event. It is the event. Art is the resistance of complacency. It always stands in opposition to numbness. That is why it doesn’t die, poetry—despite so many death notices. It is always there, waking us up when we get numb, poking us in the eye._ The song ended eventually, and Ray let herself work to the mindless chatter of the radio hosts once more.

_“Okay so we have a couple messages in. The first is to say happy birthday to Jeremy Knox. Jere has received six different birthday shout outs today and yes he deserves another. He is a wonderful boy and we love him very much.”_

Laila and Alvarez proceeded to sing a very bad and very out of tune version of _Happy Birthday,_ but it was faster paced than the song was supposed to be so Ray didn’t have to suffer through it for long.

_“And the next is from an anonymous listener,”_ Alvarez said, and then began to read the message. _“‘Shout out to the most generous person I know, who turned their entire life around to make me feel welcome. As I’m sure everyone knows, the staff and students of the Ramanujan Building have been relocated to other parts of campus, and I want to thank my office-host for making me really feel at home. I can’t ever imagine going back to having an office of my own when I can find such wonderful company here.’ Aw, that’s so nice!”_

_“That’s so sweet,”_ Laila agreed. _“It’s great to hear that Palmetto really does surpass our reputation sometimes.”_

Ray stopped listening. She didn’t feel eyes on her, so she looked up under her eyelashes to watch the desk opposite her.

Josten was hunched over, scribbling at something in her notebook. She had one leg curled under herself and the other pulled up to her chest with her foot resting on the edge of the chair. To most it would look uncomfortable, but Ray knew as well as any other non-straight person that people who sat on chairs ‘properly’ were only unimaginative.

Ray hadn’t seen what was on Josten’s computer, but she was fairly certain what Josten had been doing earlier. It wasn’t some email to her supervisor. Despite Josten’s passive aggressive theatrics, she had unintentionally been right. Ray had turned her entire life around in order to put up with Josten’s presence. She no longer stayed late in her office since she could never let herself fall asleep in a stranger’s presence. Josten’s desk took up the space where Ray used to roll out her fitness mat and get in her daily exercise, so now Ray had to rely on the shitty campus gym since Renee was out of the country with her charity work.

Years of foster homes had shaped Ray’s personality, and being ‘generous’ and ‘welcoming’ was not a trait developed from being shifted from family to family.

Josten didn’t appreciate this, of course, but Ray didn’t expect her to understand anytime soon. She certainly wasn’t going to help her with it.

* * *

**A** nother month passed, and both Ray and PSU’s student radio had been subjected to Josten’s petty shout outs. Laila and Alvarez had quickly realised that Josten’s first shout out wasn’t as friendly as they had originally thought, and regularly talked about them on their show, even on the days Josten hadn’t sent in a text. They’d made a regular segment out of it, though referred to them as King Sweet Tooth and Sir Runs Their Mouth A Lot—both believed that titles should be gender neutral. Ray had sent in a text once, but otherwise tried to ignore it. She didn’t want to give Josten the satisfaction. It had become clear very quickly that Josten was as much an instigator as Ray was, but rather than becoming directly involved, Ray preferred to instigate fights between other people and watch from the sidelines.

Kevin was a perfect target of this.

It quickly became apparent, when Kevin stormed into Ray’s office demanding her attention, that he and Josten did _not_ get along. Kevin didn’t like the fact Josten wasn’t the math history lecturer Ray had the option of sharing her office with, and the fact that Josten wasn’t remotely interested in the historical aspects of mathematics. As far as Josten was concerned, if it wasn’t an equation she could scratch out on that ridiculous blackboard she’d dragged into Ray’s office two weeks ago, she had no reason to care.

Kevin, on the other hand, was rarely interested in anything else. Ray mostly humoured him, but she reluctantly allowed herself to admit that she did find some topics remotely interesting. But unlike Ray, who rarely cared enough to disagree with anyone vocally, Kevin could rarely stomach someone having a different opinion to him. Not on something _he_ cared to have an opinion on, anyway.

Ray tuned back into the conversation around her.

“Math is the same in every language,” Josten said, her back turned to him as she wrote out something unintelligible on her blackboard. “It’s… steady. Reliable.”

“And history _isn’t?”_ Kevin asked, incredulous.

Josten then turned around, the stick of chalk in her hand hovering an inch from the surface of the blackboard. “Of course it isn’t,” she said. “History is entirely dependent on who’s there to witness it and whose side they’re on.”

“Yes, but just because someone _lied_ about it doesn’t mean it didn’t _happen,”_ Kevin said. “And with modern day technology, we know what happened. It’s fact. You can’t disagree with evidence.”

Ray decided at that point that taking a role in observation was boring. It was so easy to find entertainment from riling up Kevin. “‘Fact’ is just a word,” she said. “Science itself is just a collection of words. Truth can exist beyond language, but only if reality itself existed.”

Kevin turned to her then, with an expression of complete bafflement. “What?”

Josten leaned against her blackboard and pointed her stick of white chalk at Kevin. “She may have you there.”

Ray tried to ignore her. “It’s all just an illusion,” she said to Kevin, _and Kevin alone._ “History, science, everything. We tell ourselves how time works. You can imagine that there’s some tape-of-the-universe and when you play it backwards you can get to the portion of time we call ‘yesterday’. But the concept of yesterday only exists because we made it up. It’s not real. You can’t prove to me that yesterday or fifty years ago or a hundred years ago ever happened. Everything we tell ourselves to believe is simply fiction, a story.”

Kevin sighed exasperatedly and walked over to Josten’s chair, acting as an impromptu-table a few feet from the blackboard. He picked up the jar of chalk sticks from it and sat down. He ran a hand through his dark hair, and tugged at it slightly as he usually did when he was stressed. Ray fired an elastic band at his face to get him to stop. He scowled at her, but dropped his hand into his lap.

“You can speculate about ridiculous conspiracy theories all you like,” he started, “but you need basic logic in your life or there’s no point in doing anything ever.”

He sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face like Wymack did when frustrated. Like father like son, Ray supposed.

“Okay, so the corridor outside has loads of cobwebs around the overhead lights,” Kevin continued, and started using his hands to emphasise his words. “In the evening you can see the spiders’ webs clearly with all the insects trapped in them. You could look at that and think: ‘Aren’t the spiders clever because they know how to build webs where the other insects will fly because they’re attached to the light?’. Or you can look at it _logically_ and realise that you can only see the webs near the lights and you have only assumed that they’re the only ones there. Your poets might stand there and think about the cunningness of spiders, but when you record exactly how many webs there are, and where, you’d realise that some of them are built over the lights just by chance.”

“I wouldn’t realise anything,” Ray said, “because I wouldn’t assume I could understand what spiders were doing or why, because I am not a spider.”

Kevin opened his mouth to argue, but whatever deluded conclusion he was going to draw was swept into silence when Josten waved a hand at him to shut up. Ray was momentarily annoyed; Kevin had grown used to Ray trying to wave him off dismissively that he now just ignored her and continued talking anyway. He clearly wasn’t used to it from Josten. But, Ray was half-pleased to find, the effect didn’t last long.

“So you’re saying that we’re all living in some kind of hallucination or simulation,” Kevin said, clearly annoyed.

Ray considered agreeing with him, just to watch him lose his temper. Instead she thought of a conversation she had with Renee and said, “If we take the few basic assumptions about the Big Bang then, logically speaking, we’re either living in a multiverse or a universe created by some deity.”

Kevin leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

Josten, however, looked contemplative. She cocked her head to the side slightly, as if trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she could access it. She crossed her left ankle over her right, and Ray half hoped she’d start to pitch to the side. She kept her balance.

“How does that work?” Josten asked. It was then that Ray realised this was the first time she had said something to Ray directly without a cold or taunting tone of voice. Ray still couldn’t place Josten’s accent, but it was irritatingly pleasant to hear all the same.

Still. A pretty voice wasn’t going to tempt Ray into wasting her time explaining something found in a book. “There’s this wonderful site called Google,” she said. “Maybe you’ve heard about it.”

Josten’s face twisted once more into irritation. “Fuck you.”

Ray’s lips tugged into a mean smile and she tapped two fingers to her temple in mock salute. “Happy to be of service.”

* * *

**T** hey fell back into their regular routine of ignoring each other, with the occasional jab through the radio since Ray still refused to turn off. The one day Josten didn’t show up—apparently to stay home sick, though Ray knew she’d been ill for the better part of a week—Ray hadn’t been able to focus on anything. It had been too quiet. The room felt empty without the sound of chalk scraping on the blackboard, of Josten’s breath as she blew the dust away, of the soft footsteps of her pacing when she was trying to work through a problem.

Talia Josten had become something of a constant, a stable fixture in Ray’s day that without it something felt _missing._ Ray was furious at herself for letting herself become comfortable with her presence.

So, the following day when Josten scrambled into Ray’s office dripping wet from the rain outside, Ray made a point to ignore her. She hadn’t been listening to the radio when Josten arrived so she left it turned off and settled into the headspace she needed to write. It was easier than she’d anticipated. Ray’s mind could hone in her words with the background soundtrack of a rhythmic scrape of chalk, of rustling papers and the occasional pacing as Josten stepped back to look at her work as a whole.

But the muttering was new.

Ray moved to stand by the window, picking up her tin of rolling paper and filters, and the bag of tobacco. She perched on the edge of the windowsill and let her fingers roll the cigarette with muscle memory. Ray forced down a shiver at the cold air seeping in from the open window behind her. She wouldn’t close it, though; she didn’t want to deal with Wymack if the room perpetually smelled like cigarette smoke in spite of the no-smoking signs dotted along every corridor.

She’d hoped that by the time she was done with her cigarette, Josten would have figured out whatever problem she was stuck on. Ray had needed a break, but there was no point in sitting back at her desk to continue writing if she couldn’t concentrate for all Josten’s quiet whisperings to herself.

She was almost at the point of turning on the radio just so she had something to drown out the noise when Josten turned around to face Ray. There was something frazzled about her expression, and not just because of the dark circles under her eyes and the stray curls weaving their way out of her hair tie. Ray felt the untethered energy radiating from Josten in waves.

“We’re either living in a multiverse or a universe created by God,” Josten said. “How does that work?”

Ray pushed herself up onto the windowsill properly. Her skin quickly cooled from where the hem of her turtleneck rose above the waistband of her jeans, but she ignored it.

“I believe I told you to find out for yourself,” she said. “Did you forget how to read?”

Josten’s hands curled into fists by her side, and then loosened as if taming a reflex. Her words were spoken through gritted teeth. “I tried. Everything that I found needed me to understand several _other_ theories before I could even start to understand this one. My supervisor is on leave and the rest of the department are all over campus so I have no idea where to find them.”

Ray could have pointed out that Josten could just use a phone, but it was hard to believe that Josten had their numbers. Ray had been an unwilling witness to Boyd working himself to tears because Josten asked why she’d need his and Dan’s numbers.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked instead, throwing her cigarette butt out the window.

Josten shoved her hands into the front pocket of her hoodie. It was oversized, as everything in Josten’s wardrobe seemed to be, and fell halfway down her thighs. She looked like a drowned rat, considering that the sweater was heavy and damp with rain, but she also looked unreasonably attractive.

“I have to give a presentation to prospective students in a couple months, and I don’t know what to base it on. My supervisor thinks my research will put them off. Apparently Post-Newtonian constraints on f(R) cosmologies in metric and Palatini formalism is ‘boring’, and she’s as stubborn as you are.” She paused for a moment before inhaling and exhaling a breath of resolve. “I’m looking for inspiration. Will you help?”

“What will you give me?” Ray asked.

Josten pursed her lips and suspicion leaked into her tone. “What do you want?”

The response sparked Ray’s curiosity. Usually when Ray asked for a fair exchange, they replied with some incredulousness along the lines of _you’re supposed to help people without expecting repayment_ or the naïvity of offering ‘anything.’ Josten’s clear wariness was a stark difference.

This wasn’t the first sign of Josten’s suspicious nature. The first had been how she’d repositioned Ray’s old desk to give her a clear path to the door, and Ray picked up on it from the careful distance she kept between herself and other people. Boyd had asked if she was European when she used Celcius to describe the weather last month, and Josten had said no, but Ray had since noticed that she oscillated between spelling words using British English and American English. It could have been a case of mixed parentage, but Ray thought there was more to it than that. Josten definitely had a story, but unlike the vast majority who would use their pasts as a point of interest, something to drop anecdotes about in their pitifully boring conversations, Josten seemed to shy from any hint of her past.

Ray had undertaken a fair share of eavesdropping to find out more about the woman sharing her office, but all she had found out was that she was a math PhD student, didn’t have much of a social life, and found little interest in things that weren’t a part of her field of study. Ray had dismissed her as someone too similar to Kevin to be interesting.

Now, she had the opportunity to retract that assumption.

“I looked you up,” Ray said. “No social media. No student profile. Other than a few online essays, Talia Josten does not exist.” When Josten didn’t respond, Ray leaned further back into the window in a show of boredom. “It’s almost like you’re hiding something.”

Josten’s silence snapped. “That’s none of your business.”

“No,” Ray agreed. “But you came to me for help. You asked my price, and this is it.”

“Why?”

Ray shrugged, and waved her hand to gesture to the full bookcases lining the walls. “Tell me a story I haven’t heard before.”

Josten narrowed her eyes, before looking over her shoulder at her blackboard and likely considering her options. She turned back to Ray.

“Fine,” she said. “But I want an actual discussion about this. Not just one throwaway comment and a book title. You like words so much? Use them. I’ll tell you a story, but I want one in return.”

Ray nodded once. She was glad that she was already leaning back against the window, because if she wasn’t already she would have done now. It wasn’t out of fear or intimidation; but more out of… amusement. Josten hadn’t buckled under Ray’s unbreaking stare, but stepped forward to meet Ray halfway.

Josten exhaled loudly and, to Ray’s surprise, sat down next to her. The windows were wide enough that there was still a foot between them, but Ray still felt Josten’s presence snug beside her own. It didn’t feel as unpleasant as she expected it to. She supposed that Josten’s hoodie was cold enough to counteract her body heat, and it made her wonder what Josten was hiding underneath the sweater, why she insisted on wearing it despite how wet it was.

“I grew up in Baltimore,” Josten said. “I lived there until I was ten, until my mom left my father and took me with her. We travelled a lot.” She paused for a moment. “Like, a _lot._ We went to England for a few months to stay with her family, and then bounced around Europe for a few years before heading back to the States.”

From anyone else, Ray would have assumed that _‘bounced around Europe’_ meant some form of extended holiday or travelling to see the world after ending a stifling marriage, but Ray knew what Josten was like with money. She always went for the cheaper option, no matter what. That wasn’t a habit borne from a childhood of wealth and stability.

“Happy?” Josten asked, head tilted toward Ray with an eyebrow raised.

“No,” Ray said, because it was true. She pushed Josten’s face away with two fingers to her cheek. Her skin was soft, and Ray suppressed the urge to wipe her fingertips on her jeans to rid her of the feeling.

“How much do you know about quantum physics?” she asked. “Not PhD-level. The kind of thing you’d find in a popular science book. Wave function and probability etcetera, etcetera.”

“More than you,” Josten said.

It was the kind of thing Kevin would say, borne of arrogance, competitiveness, and a well-funded education. But, Ray also knew, it was a byproduct of his trauma. She didn’t enjoy his bullshit anymore than she had their first year together at PSU, but at least she had a face to blame for it.

Still, from someone who wasn’t Kevin, it was incredibly uninteresting.

“Our universe is made of at least two trillion galaxies,” Ray started, hoping that dumbing down the physics would only annoy Josten further, “made up of the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, and they’re all obeying the same physical laws. It’s a deterministic universe; we can tell what’s going to happen next if we know what happened before. And you can always know things for sure. It’s truth, irrefutable and untainted by bias. It’s either night or day, never both at once. If you believe in string theory, there could be countless other universes built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. Most of them can’t support life, or flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond, but even still, combine them all and you get a multiverse of possible universes in up to eleven dimensions. The leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made up of ten to the five-hundred universes—”

“And what do you think these other universes look like?”

Ray shook her head. “I don’t know. Renee didn’t say.”

“Who’s Renee?”

_A friend._ “Theology student.”

Josten hummed. “Okay, so where does quantum physics fit into that?”

“Quantum physics deals with subatomic particles,” Ray said, “and those physical laws—the past happening before the future, cause and effect, laws of motion—aren’t applicable at a subatomic level. Until they’re observed, they exist in a smeared-out state of all possible positions in the atom: the superposition, or the wave function.”

A small crease appeared between Josten’s eyebrows as they pulled together in a frown. “Wait. What?”

Ray saved that frown for later when she needed ammunition the next time Josten claimed to know more than she did. It was apparent that Josten cared more about the mathematical part of her research than she did the cosmological. “Last Wednesday you didn’t come into the office. I didn’t know where you were. I _assumed_ you were at home, sick, but I didn’t know for sure. You could have been somewhere else on campus, on one of your stupid runs, on a cruise, on Mars, whatever. These are all possibilities, though some are more likely than others.”

Josten didn’t answer immediately. “I didn’t think you’d notice whether I was here or not.”

Ray waved her off. “It was blissfully quiet,” she lied. “Anyway, conventional logic meant that you were definitely in one place or another, regardless of whether or not I’d seen you there or knew you were there for sure. You were somewhere, I just didn’t know where that was.”

Josten nodded, and for a moment Ray could see what normal life was supposed to be like. Was this what Nicky and Aaron had? Sharing their houses in Stuttgart and Chicago with Erik and Katelyn, and asking such a mundane question: are they at the shop or are they at work? Ray had never thought that domesticity was something she wanted, but the way the thought snuck up in her mind made her decide to bring it up with Bee.

“Obviously you’re standing in for the particle in this example,” she said, to make sure that Josten knew that Ray didn’t actually care where she spent her time. “But quantum physics says that when your situation is unknown—whether you’re on a run or at home—you actually exist in all places at once until someone finds you and observes you. Instead of one clear ‘reality,’ there’s a smear. You’re on a run and at home and somewhere else on campus, and it’s only when I go out looking for you and see that you’re at home that all the other possibilities melt away and reality is set.”

Surprisingly, Josten smiled at that. It wasn’t the sharp grin she used when tormenting Kevin, but smaller, quieter, and Ray couldn’t look away.

Josten caught her looking though, and her lips fell back into a neutral line. “I told you that my mom took me when I was ten. My father tried to find us. I like the idea that all those years running from him, we existed everywhere at once. It makes us sound harder to track down than what I used to think. Well, until he found us.”

Ray didn’t know what to do with this information. She hadn’t asked for it, and so wouldn’t trade one of her own secrets. It wasn’t her problem if Josten had loose lips.

Josten didn’t seem to mind that Ray said nothing back. “So observation has an effect on reality?”

Ray nodded. “It’s called the Copenhagen interpretation,” she said, and waited while Josten scrawled out the name on the back of her hand. “The idea is that all probabilities exist as a wave function until an external observer looks at it, and then all probabilities collapse into one definite reality.”

“Are there other interpretations?”

“There’s the many-worlds interpretation, which suggests that each possibility exists at once, but in its own separate universe. So in one universe you’re at home, in another you’re on a run, and in another…” She trailed off, trying to think of another example before she remembered the example Renee used when explaining the theory. “You’re in a café in Prague or whatever.”

Josten nodded, and seemed to think about that for a while. Ray was surprised at how comfortable the silence felt. Usually she would stare at people until they left, or just left the room herself, but with Josten she didn’t feel that clawing need to be alone. It was exposure, of course. The only other person’s company Ray didn’t mind was Kevin, and that was from knowing him since they were undergrads. Ray was just used to Josten’s presence because they’d spent every day over the last four months in the same room.

“Last week, you said something about the Big Bang, and that if what we know about it is true, we’re either living in a multiverse or a universe created by God.”

Ray started rolling another cigarette so she had something to do with her hands. Josten noticed, but didn’t complain about it, though Ray had never seen her go out for a smoke break. “The primordial particle—the thing that went ‘bang’ fourteen billion years ago—should be just like any other particle.” Ray licked the edge of the filter paper to seal it. She noticed Josten’s eyes on her as she did, but didn’t meet her gaze until she brought the cigarette down from her mouth. Josten wasn’t looking at her anymore, but her skin was slightly flushed around her cheekbones, bringing out a glow to her already warm brown skin. _Interesting._

“It should have its wavefunction,” Ray continued, “its own series of possibilities about where it was and what it was doing. What we know about quantum physics suggests that unless something observed the exact state of the particle, its wavefunction would not collapse. It would exist in a state of all probabilities at once.”

“So in order for the universe to exist, something external to the universe had to observe it,” Josten said, and waited for Ray to nod in confirmation. “And that’s God. Or a God.”

Ray nodded again. “If you choose to believe the Copenhagen interpretation, yes. ‘God,’ whatever that means to you, collapsed the wavefunction that became the universe, meaning that out of all probabilities, God collapsed the original particle into the universe which we now exist in. If you reject that theory, and still accept quantum physics, then you’re left with the many-worlds interpretation, which would suggest that there is no external observer and therefore no collapse. Instead, all of those probabilities exist, in the form of other universes.”

“And what if you reject quantum physics too?” Josten asked.

“Then your phone and your credit cards stop working.”

“I don’t have a phone or a credit card.”

Ray turned to look at her and saw that she hadn’t been joking. Ray sighed in exasperation, because of course, _of course,_ she didn’t have a phone or a credit card. Josten was a cryptid, a walking enigma. It was then, turned to face Josten, that Ray noticed that it was dark outside. She leaned over toward her desk and scraped over her phone with her fingertips until it was within reach. She checked the time to find that she’d definitely gone over the ten minutes she’d expected to take for a ‘quick break’. Her stomach rumbled in response.

“Oh,” Josten said, leaning forward to read the time on Ray’s phone screen. “It’s later than I thought.”

Ray hummed, but otherwise didn’t respond.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” Josten asked.

Ray thought about it. She was hungry, and she didn’t entirely hate Josten’s company when they weren’t actively trying to annoy the other. “You’re buying.”

She didn’t trust Josten to buy anything good, though, so leaned over her desk to pull her coat off the back of her chair. It was made from a heavy black wool and fell to her shins when she wore it, though on most women she supposed it was supposed to be knee-length. Shops had the ‘petite’ range of course, which tended to be shorter in the leg, but those clothes were also made for women of a smaller build, which Ray certainly was not. The time she spent outside her office and apartment Ray was invariably at her local gym, sometimes training with Kevin, sometimes eating ice-cream and sweets in front of him as he snapped at her between each rep. So, Ray had followed a few online tutorials and learned how to hem her jeans.

Josten hadn’t brought a coat with her, only the damp grey hoodie she had been wearing all day. Ray would have called her out on being stupid, but it wasn’t raining and it wasn’t her problem. If Josten wanted to catch a cold from her own idiocy then Ray wouldn’t stop her.

They didn’t talk as they descended the stairs down to the ground floor—Josten being curiously leery about using the elevator—and remained in surprisingly comfortable silence until Ray walked past the corner shop one block away.

“Ray?” Josten called out. It took Ray a second to recover from hearing the sound of her name. She realised in that moment that she had never heard Josten use it before. She turned to see her standing outside the doorway of the shop. Josten tilted her head toward the doorway, as if Ray had accidentally passed it without paying attention.

Ray just turned around again and continued walking further down the road. There were few people about, so Ray had no problem hearing the slap of Josten’s footsteps as she ran to catch up with her. Instead of looking annoyed to have to run, Josten looked irritatingly exhilarated by the exercise. Ray stared straight ahead so she didn’t have to look at the quiet joy radiating from the woman beside her.

When Ray turned into a supermarket, Josten only followed her inside without question. Ray had prepared an answer for when Josten asked why she had insisted on going to the larger store—because the smaller one didn’t stock her favourite ice-cream flavour, which was true—but Josten didn’t raise the question. She seemed content to follow Ray around rather than peruse the aisles for whatever snacks she wanted. Ray hadn’t picked up a basket on her way in, so just pushed packets of gummies and bars of chocolate into Josten’s arms since she didn’t seem to pick up anything for herself.

When they reached the technology aisle, Josten didn’t comment when Ray pulled off a grey flip-phone in a plastic casing and shoved it at her. They continued their meandering track around the store until Ray paid for it all despite her earlier claim that Josten would pay. Ray decided that she did it because Josten’s hands were full, and she didn’t want to wait around for Josten to fumble around in her front hoodie pocket when Ray’s wallet was easily within reach.

They carried one bag each as they walked back to the Angelou Building, and once they were inside Ray’s office Ray quickly started to divvy up the snacks. The majority were hers, but Josten had bought a selection of fresh fruits and a carton of orange juice. When Ray found the phone she took it out of its packaging and started to set it up while Josten packed some of the fruits in her backpack and left an orange out for herself to eat now. Ray didn’t understand it; she’d been the one to suggest they go out for food so it made no sense for her to settle for one orange. She didn’t say anything about it, though, instead focusing on adding a few contacts to the phone: herself, Wymack, Dan, Boyd, and, out of curiosity, Bee.

When Ray threw it at her, Josten caught the phone instinctively, but froze when she saw what it was she held in her hand. She uncurled her fingers and stared at the phone resting in her palm as if it were the hope found in Pandora’s Box. She seemed to struggle for words, and all she could come out with was, “What.” She couldn’t even make it a question.

Ray watched as several emotions crossed Josten’s face: confusion, grief, panic. Ray watched her spiral until she grew bored of it.

“Josten.”

It seemed to cut through whatever was going on inside Josten’s head. She dragged her stare from the phone to Ray, and swallowed hard. Ray noticed how Josten wrapped her fingers around the phone once more, as if to hide it from view. “No,” she said eventually.

Ray tilted her head to the side slightly as she considered what steps to take. “So ungrateful,” she said. “Most people would expect a thank you.”

“No,” Josten said, slowly spirally back into a panic. “I can’t. I— I don’t need a phone.”

“Maybe,” Ray said, because she wouldn’t claim to know what Josten did or didn’t need any more than she would claim to know why the spiders built their webs in the hallway outside. She stepped forward and reached for Josten’s wrist. “But those who don’t need a phone rarely start to panic when presented with one. Curiosity killed the cat, maybe, but I do wonder why this—” Ray gestured to Josten’s face, “—looks more honest than everything else.”

“Fuck you,” Josten said in a ragged voice.

Curiosity was a steep slope. One question only leads to another and it’s a hard hill to climb up. Ray let impulsivity cloud her judgement and let herself slide down that slope, picking up speed with her momentum.

“I prefer women to look a little less traumatised so that’s a hard no from me.”

Josten flinched, and, as curiosity gained momentum, wrapped her arms around her stomach. Ray had wondered what she hid underneath oversized clothes but now those musings felt more concrete, more tangible. She wanted to pick at Josten’s seams and see what could be laid bare when she tugged at her threads.

Josten didn’t comment about Ray’s coming out, though Ray had expected a bigger reaction considering the blush that spread on Josten’s face when she watched Ray roll a cigarette and seal it with her tongue. Either Josten flushed at any sort of innuendo, or she was so far down the rabbit hole of denial that she didn’t pick up on her own attraction. Either way, Ray figured that she needed more concrete evidence before she considered acting on anything and, if she did decide to act, she would have to say it in undeniable terms.

Ray cleared her head. They were thoughts for another time, a time when Josten wasn’t visibly panicking. Ray slid her hand down Josten’s wrist until she reached her hand, and uncurled her fingers as she slid the phone out of her grasp. Josten looked both relieved and overwhelmingly sad at the loss.

Ray figured that the phone could wait until another day. She walked over to the cardboard box beside her desk and pulled out _The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III._ Unlike the phone, Ray wouldn’t throw this book at Josten. Years in foster care had built the habit of looking after her own things, even if she didn’t care about the belongings of others. When Ray looked over, Josten was staring blankly at the back wall. Ray blocked Josten’s line of sight with the cover of the book and watched as her eyes snapped back into focus.

Josten tentatively reached out to take it from Ray’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

Ray recognised the tone of her voice. It was the same tone Ray had heard in Kevin, in Aaron, in herself. It was a tone built from years of abuse, of being so used to pain and numbness that even a glimmer of kindness seemed like an oasis. A torturous hallucination that would only bring more pain, but you still walk to that oasis anyway. Even though you knew it wasn’t real, that the hallucination wouldn’t last, you couldn’t help but want it anyway.

And now Josten was looking at Ray like she could fix all of the world’s problems. Like she was her answer.

Ray knew she wasn’t anyone’s answer, certainly not Josten’s, but she found her own oasis of warmth in her chest, and she couldn’t quite ignore it. It had dug its roots in, and it was here to stay.

* * *

**I** n the following weeks that passed, Ray noticed a difference in the interactions between Josten and herself. They were notably less antagonistic. Josten still sent in passive aggressive shout outs to the campus radio, which Laila and Alvarez received with glee, but they seemed almost… teasing. Every time Ray heard Josten’s latest snipey comment about her, she would look over to Josten’s desk with a blank, bored expression, and Josten would only smile sharply in response.

Several days ago Josten had gotten up from her desk and walked toward the door holding Boyd’s ‘friendship’ mug, and paused in the doorway. She had turned around then, and asked Ray how she preferred her coffee. Ray had been skeptical. She had wondered if Josten had only turned down the radio shout outs in order to lull Ray into a false sense of security. So Ray had told her that she liked her coffee black and unsweetened, expecting that Josten would return with milky, sweet coffee as some kind of ‘jab’. Instead, Josten had returned with two mugs of black coffee, one of which she set on Ray’s desk. Ray had stared at it, confused, and took two sips before grimacing and taking it back to the kitchen to fix. When Josten realised what Ray had done, she had only laughed. Ray, sat back down at her desk, had watched her laugh, watched her eyes crinkle in amusement and her lips pull back into a wide smile that had revealed those slightly crooked teeth. Ray hadn’t been able to bring herself to look away.

Ray wasn’t the only one with a new habit of staring, though. Ray knew that Josten spent a lot of her free time and breaks sketching, doodling the assortment of objects in Ray’s office and, unoriginally, fox paws, from PSU’s mascot. But it seemed that Josten didn’t stick to still life. On a few occasions, Ray had looked up from her laptop or her book to notice Josten half curled in her desk chair and sketchbook perched on her knees. She would be sketching away, filling Ray’s office with the soft sound of pencil or charcoal on paper, until she looked up and met Ray’s gaze. The first couple times it happened, Josten would quickly look away, usually only flickering her eyes to something beside or behind Ray, as if she had been drawing the bookcase behind her or the floor lamp next to Ray’s desk. After that, Josten tended to just hold Ray’s gaze for a few moments, before looking back to her drawing, adding a few lines or some shading, and then looking back up at her. Ray didn’t call her out on it, or ask her to stop, but she didn’t want to bring it up with Bee. It felt too quiet, something she didn’t want to leave the safe space of her office, as if bringing it up with Bee in their fortnightly sessions would make it too loud, too tangible, too real.

It was the middle of a Thursday afternoon when Josten asked for help again.

Josten had been sat on the floor of Ray’s office all morning with several open books and scattered pages around her. She occasionally read something and then stood up to copy it on the chalk-rendered mind map on her blackboard. Ray didn’t understand the patterns of where each point connected to another, but Josten didn’t seem like she planned to explain them to either Ray or to herself. Occasionally she’d write something and then stop all of a sudden, pause, and then find the page she had been reading from earlier to link it with something else.

“Red one,” Ray said, when Josten had been flipping through several books and essays trying to find a particular paragraph about Einstein. Ray had watched Josten link two points with a line of white chalk, but was apparently looking for something else to add to it.

Josten looked up. “What?”

“Red one,” Ray repeated, and nodded to one of the books to the right of her, hidden under a stapled booklet of articles.

Josten lifted the papers and found the book underneath. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

Ray ignored her and went back to her thesis. _A poem is the artifact or the trace that is left behind and created through the poet’s movement of mind over a problem or a situation. We may approach poetry the same way that we may approach philosophy or other forms of critical thought and inquiry—as a way to help us think through problems: ethical, moral, political, social, and even personal problems. How do we contend with our own personal histories, which may have their own contradictions or sites of unsettled feelings? When we think about these problems, language is generated, and what we are left with is a poem, which preserves the movement of the mind over that particular issue. We can then continue to read this preservation after the poet has moved on from that poem._

Ray had helped Josten place another two lines or paragraphs, and then Josten started to directly ask which point had been on which page. Most of the time Ray hadn’t been looking, and would tell her as such, but she also didn’t see the point in withholding information when Josten was so noisy trying to find a particular sentence again. Ray ignored the little part of her mind which asked why she hadn’t suggested that Josten write down the source and page number on the blackboard.

It was another few minutes of quiet before Josten spoke up again. “What do you think?”

When Ray looked up, Josten was on her feet, hand on hip and tapping the stick of chalk against her lips as she thought. She turned around when Ray didn’t reply, but didn’t seem surprised that Ray had looked up at the sound of her voice. She tilted her head in the direction of the blackboard.

Ray had to put on her reading glasses to reveal the scrawl of words and equations and strange shapes ornamenting the smooth matte surface of the blackboard. In the bottom right corner was a small doodle of a cat inside a square, with one eye crossed out. Beside it read, _Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper._

“So I was thinking about what you said last month,” Josten said, and Ray watched the speck of chalk on Josten’s lips dance as she talked, “about the dimensions the universes exist in. And I found this German mathematician, Theodor Kaluza—” Josten drew a circle around his name, “—who suggested that our universe had more than the three dimensions we thought we had—height, width, and depth—but that we can’t see them.”

Josten stepped forward to her blackboard and tapped her chalk stick under a scrawled _Einstein — warped space._ “Einstein said that space is flat until there’s matter. And matter in the environment, such as the Sun or Earth, causes the fabric of space to warp and curve. That’s what causes gravity. The moon is kept in orbit of the Earth because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that it, the Sun, and the Earth created by virtue of their presence.”

Josten then drew a line from _Einstein — warped space_ back to _Kaluza._ “So Kaluza thought that if Einstein had been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space, he could do the same for the other known force at the time: the electromagnetic force. He thought that if he wanted to describe one more force, he needed one more dimension. So he imagined that the world had four dimensions in space, not three, and he thought that electromagnetism warped and curved in that fourth dimension. And—” Josten jabbed the chalk at the blackboard again for emphasis and turned to Ray with an excited expression, as if she couldn’t believe she had been given the chance to tell Ray about this. Ray couldn’t bring herself to look away or to tune her out, so she watched and she listened with rapt attention. “—when he found the equations describing these warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions, he also found the old equation that scientists had already known to describe the electromagnetic force.

“But,” Josten continued, “we still can’t see this fourth dimension, so where is it?” She then drew another line from _Kaluza_ to _Oskar Klein._ “This man, Oskar Klein, suggested that dimensions came in two varieties: big, easy to see dimensions, and dimensions that are curled-up so small that we can’t see them. But when they tried to test it in detail with what they knew about physics at the time, it didn’t work.”

Ray waited, because she doubted that that was the end of Josten’s talk. She certainly wasn’t going to ask, _‘So what does work?’_ like a child talking back to their favourite television show. Josten didn’t seem to be waiting for a response anyway. She drove on like a freight train, her determination and obsession rivalling only that of Kevin.

“But since then we have found that atoms can be divided into electrons, neutrons, and protons, and the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them called quarks.”

Ray nodded, since this was something she understood.

“So with this, string theory was born. Eventually it developed into the idea that inside these quarks is this energy that looks like vibrating strings. Each can vibrate in different patterns, and it’s these vibrations that produce the different particles that make up the world around us. So, in theory, the universe is built up on a huge number of these tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies.

“But, the mathematics of string theory don’t work if you only consider three dimensions of space. In fact—” Josten pointed her chalk at Ray, “—you need eleven dimensions, like you said last month. Ten dimensions of space and one dimension of time. We don’t yet know the exact shapes of these dimensions, just that whatever shapes they do have constrains how the strings can vibrate and dictates the amount of dark energy within the universe.”

“What’s dark energy?” Ray asked, because while most of what Josten was saying made at least a little sense, ‘dark energy’ was a curveball.

Josten looked over her shoulder, and whatever she saw on Ray’s face made her turn fully toward her. “Dark energy is what we now call the invisible energy that Einstein thought existed in space. He thought there was invisible energy, sort of like an invisible mist, filling space, and believed that the gravity generated by this mist was repulsive. This mist—dark energy—explains why we’ve found that the galaxies in our universe are pushing away from every other, and why the universe is expanding at a growing rate. The astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy had to be infusing space to account for the rate of expansion,” Josten continued, “but the number they found was incredibly small. And we have no idea why it’s so small. But anyway, that’s beside the point.”

She then tapped her chalk on the shapes doodled around the edges of the blackboard—Schrödinger's cat aside. “So, originally there were five candidate shapes for these additional dimensions in space, but now there are billions of them.”

She turned back to Ray then, and walked over to perch on the edge of Ray’s desk. “But I’ve been thinking about what you said. About how quarks exist in a smeared-out state of all possible positions until they’re observed, and how the many-worlds interpretation suggests that all of those possibilities, whether I was at home or on a run or— what was it you said? In Prague? Anyway, all of these possibilities exist at once in their own separate universe. So what if all of the possible shapes of these additional dimensions exist? And if we go along with the idea of the multiverse, all of these universes have different shapes and different physical features and different amounts of dark energy.”

Unlike Ray, Josten didn’t move her hands much when she explained something she found interesting. She kept one of her hands pushed in the front pocket of her hoodie, and the other on Ray’s desk to keep her balance. Ray wondered whether the imprint of her palm would remain when Josten moved her hand.

“But that’s where I’m stuck,” Josten said. “I need another part of my research. A question. Something that links everything together…” She trailed off, but Ray heard the unspoken _‘but I have no idea what that is.’_

Ray leaned back in her chair and thought. She played out a sped up version of Josten’s presentation in her mind, trying to draw links between points like Josten did on her blackboard. She paused when she recalled Josten’s explanation on dark energy.

“You said that no one knows why there’s so little dark energy in this universe,” Ray said, and waited for Josten to nod. “But if there are other universes, and they all have different amounts of dark energy because the dimensions have different shapes, then the laws of physics can’t explain this one number for the dark energy, because there wouldn’t be just one number. There would be many numbers.”

Josten nodded. “Yeah, but the reason we care about _this_ amount of dark energy, the dark energy in our universe, is because it’s the one we’ve found ourselves in. The other universes with more dark energy have too much repulsive gravity to allow matter to clump together into galaxies, and the universes with too little dark energy collapse back in on themselves, so again, galaxies don’t form. And without the galaxies, there’s no life.”

Ray made a gesture with her wrist as if to say, _‘So there you go.’_ “Isn’t that it, then? Life exists in this universe because it has the particular amount of dark energy we needed for conditions hospitable for life. Mystery solved, multiverse found.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t _explain_ anything. Dark energy isn’t the fuel that can generate universes, it’s a byproduct of whatever mechanism does create universes.”

“The Big Bang,” Ray said.

“The Big Bang,” Josten agreed. Then stilled. _“The Big Bang._ That’s it. That’s my third part. Everyone knows that the Big Bang explains how our universe evolved after the bang, but I haven’t looked into inflationary cosmology.”

Ray nodded, and Josten gave her an incredulous look. “You’re studying English Lit. How come you know so much about all of this, anyway?”

Ray shrugged. “My brother and I used to watch science documentaries.”

Josten paused at that. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“We don’t talk.”

Ray was content to leaving it at that, but Josten seemed to get her nose stuck in Ray’s business.

“Why not?”

“Why won’t you take the phone?”

Josten didn’t answer immediately, likely trying to keep up with Ray’s train of thought. Ray could see the moment she caught up: all of her enthusiasm for the universe drained away to leave a husk of steel and stone.

“Are we doing the honesty thing again?”

“Do we need to?” Ray asked, taking the phone from the top drawer of her desk. She set it beside Josten’s hand. “You start.”

Josten looked at it for a long while before speaking. As she did, she lifted her hand and turned the phone in circles on the desk, seemingly unable to pick it up and pocket it like a normal person could.

“You know,” she started, “most parents give their children a phone so they can keep track of them throughout the day. To me and my mom, being tracked was not an option. We had burner phones to keep tabs on each other, but we had to trash them every time we moved. When my mom died I didn’t need a phone anymore, and I still don’t. Who am I supposed to call?”

“Dan, Boyd, a therapist. I don’t care.”

“I’m remembering why I don’t like you.”

Ray raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you forgot in the first place. Did you change your mind?”

Josten stopped spinning the phone. “Why are you so insistent that I have a phone?”

“I sometimes forget my keys,” Ray said, gesturing to the office.

Josten shook her head once. “You don’t forget anything.”

Ray paused at that. She hadn’t been sure Josten had figured that out, but she supposed reciting page numbers to her had given it away. Instead of replying, Ray pulled out her own phone from her pocket. It was identical to the one she bought Josten, only black where Josten’s was grey. She flipped it open and pressed down hard on EIGHT. There was silence for a few beats, and then the distinct hum of her phone dialling out. Ray didn’t bother putting the phone on speaker. She wanted the sound of Josten’s new ringtone to take centre stage.

Josten stopped spinning her phone as the lyrics about runaways kicked in, and then flipped it open only to crush the reject button with her thumb. “You’re not funny.”

“On the contrary,” Ray said, and then sighed exasperatedly as she leaned forward toward Josten. She snagged two fingers in the collar of the ridiculously large shirt Josten was wearing and held her in place. “When someone tries to ring you, they usually like it when you pick up.”

“But what I would like is to put that phone through your teeth.”

Ray smiled at that, all teeth and menace. “Do the others still think you’re quiet?”

Josten made to grab Ray’s wrist to pull her off, and on reflex Ray caught Josten’s forearm and pinned it down onto the desk.

“Don’t,” Ray said.

She half expected Josten to fight back, half expected her to scoff and suggest that if Ray didn’t want to be touched she shouldn’t go around grabbing others’ clothes.

Instead, Josten only held her arm still and looked up at Ray’s face. Ray watched her vision dart from meeting one of Ray’s eyes to the other, not out of fear or panic, but out of curiosity.

“Okay,” was all Josten said.

_Okay?_ Ray didn’t understand what that meant, so she let go of her arm and leaned back into her chair to give herself some space. She picked up her phone again so she had something to do with her hands, and called the other phone once more. This time, Josten kept watching Ray and didn’t make a move to stop the music.

She didn’t make a move to answer the call either, though.

“Your phone’s ringing,” Ray said, as if Josten hadn’t noticed.

After a second, Josten reached over, pressed the answer button, and slowly raised the phone to her ear.

Ray lifted hers to her ear as well, and began to speak. “I don’t care if you use this phone tomorrow. I don’t care if you never use it again. But do us all a favour and stop holding onto whatever life you used to lead. You didn’t need a phone back then, fine. But people tend to need one now. You’re not running, so act like you’re staying.”

Josten didn’t reply, but kept the phone to her ear until Ray hung up and snapped her phone shut. Josten lowered hers into her lap and stared at it for a long while until she closed it with a quiet click. She pushed it into the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and kept her hand in there too, as if worried the phone would suddenly disappear unless she kept it within her grasp. All the while, she kept looking at Ray. Ray didn’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t like the idea of Josten finding it. She spun her chair around until it faced the window. The fire engines had left the Ramanujan Building months ago, and she’d overheard Dan and Wymack talking about how they were going to reopen it by September. It wouldn’t be long before Josten was able to leave Ray’s office and everything could go back to normal.

She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that the thought left an uncomfortable feeling in her stomach, a cold weight that lingered even after she cleared her mind of the thought.

“If you’re done having your issues,” Ray said. “Take your turn.”

“I already asked it,” Josten said eventually. “Why don’t you talk to your brother?”

Ray thought about all of Nicky’s nagging, _‘Just call him! You can’t spend the rest of your lives in silence. You’re his sister!’_ and the dial tone of the first time Ray tried to call Aaron since they finished their undergrads. She remembered the first hum, the second, and the cut-off of the third when Aaron had rejected her call.

“He doesn’t talk to me,” Ray said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Ask a different question.”

“No. Why are you not close with your brother?”

Ray remembered the first moment she met Aaron, remembered walking into the visitation room with slow, unenthusiastic steps. It still hadn’t been slow enough for Aaron to pick up on her hostility. She hadn’t wanted to see him when she had been living with the Spears, and it hadn’t changed with her location. She didn’t want to see the boy who hadn’t been shipped from house to house, feeling more and more unwanted with every closed door.

But no matter how slowly Ray walked into that room she would have felt Aaron’s hope. That nauseatingly optimistic energy had been suffocating. 

That hope had been seeded when he heard one of the guards refer to her as ‘Ray’ instead of ‘Andrea’. The hope had grown when he saw her for the first time, with hair sheared close to her skull, broad arms, and her face bare of the makeup the other kids in juvie wore to visit their families. It wasn’t Ray’s fault that choosing not to wear the guise of femininity, that non-action, was considered to represent masculinity. Her body was not a blank slate. But it was not entirely her own, either. They had grown together in hazardous soil and grew apart with every new environment. Yet upon seeing her, Aaron had hoped for a shared experience, that despite the many years and miles between them, their branches could once again reconnect.

All she had to do to uproot that sapling of hope was to correct the pronouns Aaron used for her.

_“What?”_ Aaron had stuttered out beside Luther’s side.

_“She. I don’t know what education was like with a creationist like our dear uncle, but twins can be fraternal. We’re different genders.”_

Even after ten years, Ray knew Aaron still felt bitter over that. She didn’t blame him for it; at the time she didn’t care enough to, and now she knew that it was an unavoidable byproduct of the general bullshit he’d had to live with for so long. Ray hadn’t been able to help him then, and she still didn’t know what would help him now. That rejected phone call was enough to tell her that he didn’t want her to try. She hadn’t called again, and if Nicky’s endless pestering was what she had to put up with to keep her promise to Aaron, so be it.

Aaron hadn’t responded for a while after she’d said that, chewing on his lips as he thought on something. He didn’t look at her when he eventually said, _“We’re not fraternal.”_

_“You’re identical twins, Andrea,”_ Luther had added unhelpfully.

Ray didn’t bother to turn to him. He was one-dimensional at best; did what he was told and all his supposed ‘morality’ could be found in an age old book. There was nothing original about him, and nothing at all that was interesting. So she still looked at Aaron, who didn’t look back as his shoulders grew tense and brittle under her gaze.

_“Stop staring at me,”_ he had snapped, his eyes finally meeting hers and then darting away as if burned.

_“Okay,”_ Ray had said, and then looked back to Luther and his unpleasant face. She hadn’t looked at Aaron for the rest of that meeting, just as he had asked her to.

Ray forced her thoughts back into the present. “Ask a different question,” she repeated.

“You didn’t give me an option to answer something else,” Josten protested.

“It’s not my secret to share.”

Josten pursed her lips. “Fine. Why English Literature?”

* * *

**T** he day of Josten’s presentation was a warm one. Ray kept the fan on her desk, but allowed it to rotate across the room to hit Josten every few seconds rather than aiming it solely on herself. If Josten brought it up, she knew she would say that it was to keep the whole room cooler, but something told her that Josten wouldn’t ask. She had this strange knack for knowing when and what to push, and when to leave things alone. It was a trait Ray had only seen in Renee, but that had been a habit learned from the years spent studying for their undergraduate degrees rather than anything innate. It was a little unnerving, to say the least, that Josten could read Ray’s moods when they’d known each other for less than a year.

Even still, a desk fan wasn’t strong enough to stop Ray from sweating in her black t-shirt and armbands. Her skin felt sticky and itchy, and after tugging at it for the eighth time, she got up and grabbed her keys.

Josten looked up. “Where are you going?” she asked, as if that were any of her business.

“Home,” Ray answered anyway. “I need a new shirt.”

Josten looked down at her own t-shirt, short sleeves but in a green light enough that the sweat patches were going to become obvious if she didn’t cool down soon. “Can I borrow your fan while you’re gone? I need to dry this shirt before I give my talk in a couple hours.”

Ray paused, and then looked at Josten’s ratty backpack. She had thought Josten would have been smart enough to pack another shirt in advance, but apparently she’d overestimated her.

Ray tried to assess whether the heat was getting to her, but she didn’t find a logical explanation for why she then left the room with the door open in an obvious invitation for Josten to follow. She didn’t wait for her, or turn around to check whether Josten was following, because she heard the door close and the soft slap of Josten’s shoes as she jogged to catch up with her. It didn’t take long; they were of a similar height but Josten definitely had longer legs than Ray did. Not that Ray had been looking. Much.

As Ray led the way to her apartment, Josten chattered away about her upcoming presentation. She was rehearsing her speech again and again, despite the fact that she already had it memorised and that Ray wasn’t even listening. Ray had already unwillingly memorised Josten’s entire speech just from hearing it the first time. She knew far too much about mathematical cosmology than any English Literature graduate should. She mused whether she could ask Wymack for a second diploma after vicariously studying a second subject for eight months.

The door to Ray’s apartment building was old, and the dark blue paint was peeling. Ray shoved her key into the lock and ignored the groan as the door was pushed open.

The hallway and stairs up to the third floor were perpetually cold, but Ray was used to it and Josten didn’t comment. Ray’s apartment door opened with ease, and Ray held the door open for Josten to let her inside before sliding the lock back into place. When she turned around, Josten was looking around Ray’s apartment without bothering to hide her curiosity. Ray left her to it, and unlocked her bedroom door.

Ray’s clothes were predominantly black with varying shades of grey and a single purple sweater that she’d stolen from Nicky back when they were at college. She pushed each coat hanger along the rail of her wardrobe as she considered each piece of clothing. There was no use in wearing anything tightly fitted, and she needed something breathable. She pulled out an oversized t-shirt for herself, and then paused. From the sound of her footsteps, Ray knew Josten had finished her snooping and now wanted Ray’s attention like a puppy tired of exploring. Ray waited for Josten to barge in like she had done with Ray’s office, but instead there came a soft knocking at the door.

Ray cleared her throat of something unidentifiable and called her in.

“Did you get your shirt?” she asked, hovering in the doorway like she was afraid of stepping inside.

Ray nodded, and Josten paused for a second when Ray didn’t immediately follow her out into the hallway. “Oh. You need to change. Sorry.”

“Here,” Ray said, and then turned back to her wardrobe. She pushed a few more coat hangers along the rail before finding a light grey shirt in breathable cotton. When she pulled it out, Josten had finally stepped inside her room and now stood within arms’ reach. Ray held out the shirt to Josten’s shoulders. It would be a little loose fitting, but while Josten didn’t have the biceps Ray did, she wouldn’t completely drown in it. Ray pushed the hanger harder into Josten’s shoulders until Josten raised her hand and clasped her fingers around the hook of the hanger.

“I don’t need your clothes,” she said, lowering the shirt away from her chest but not enough to let it drag along the floor.

Ray tugged at the t-shirt Josten was wearing now. It was damp with sweat. “No?”

“Fine.”

“Bathroom’s across the hall. There’s a spare towel under the sink,” Ray told her, and when Josten only frowned, Ray added, “You stink.”

“You don’t smell too pleasant either,” Josten snapped.

Ray raised an eyebrow but Josten didn’t protest further. She took the shirt with her as she left the room. Ray followed her out, but went into the kitchen instead. She set up a pan on the stove and started to fry some tortilla wraps while she grabbed the lettuce and jalapeños from the fridge. When Josten came through Ray took the pan off the heat.

The steam from the bathroom had pulled out the shirt’s wrinkles but Ray still stepped closer and reached out to neaten the lapels. Josten held still all the while with her hands down by her sides, and seemed to be holding her breath. Ray didn’t look up at her face, keeping her eyes pinned on the neat seams of the shirt, but she could feel Josten’s piercing gaze on her. Ray told herself to stop fussing, that the shirt was already smooth, but when she ran her palms down from her shoulders her hands lingered. She felt Josten’s breath fan across her cheeks and she let go, stepping back and putting space between them. Ray turned back to the stove and put the heat back on the pan.

She breathed in, breathed out, and then said, “Don’t let this burn.”

When Josten didn’t answer or move, Ray turned around again. Josten was still standing in the same spot, but when she felt Ray’s eyes on her she stepped forward and over to the stove.

“What is this?” she asked with trepidation to the plain tortilla and sparse ingredients on the counter.

“Hope you’re hungry,” Ray said, and then left the kitchen. She grabbed her towel and clean clothes from her bedroom and then crossed the hallway to the bathroom.

The mirror was still steamed up, but Ray ignored it as she locked the door, stripped off, and scrubbed off the day’s sweat with the expensive soap she tended to save for night’s out with Kevin or Nicky when he came to visit. It smelled of patchouli and citrus, and made Josten stutter out, _“You smell nice”_ two weeks ago when Ray was leaving the office to meet Kevin at Eden’s Twilight. Ray had told Kevin to invite Josten along, but apparently Josten didn’t drink and didn’t like crowds or loud music. Ray hadn’t seen the point in pushing the matter.

When she stepped out of the bathroom she noticed the smell of basil in the hallway, so she followed the scent to the kitchen. She found Josten using a small spatula to scoop green pesto onto the tortilla, scatter on the lettuce and jalapeños, and then fold the tortilla in half and then into quarters. Ray lent on the doorframe for a while, watching Josten cook in her kitchen. It was clear that Josten still hadn’t worked out where anything was; it took three cupboard doors to find the plates and four drawers to find the cutlery.

“Are you gonna come in or not?” Josten asked as she was plating up the quesadillas.

Ray hadn’t realised that Josten had noticed her, and apparently didn’t mind Ray’s staring while she made herself at home in Ray’s kitchen.

When Ray didn’t immediately move, Josten turned around. Ray noticed that she’d put on the apron Nicky bought Ray a few years ago. Ray had never bothered wearing it before but she couldn’t imagine why Josten, a woman so intent on leaving destruction behind in the wake of her words, could be so carefully considerate when it came to keeping borrowed clothes clean. It wasn’t like Josten cared about her own clothing.

Josten was smiling when Ray looked up from the apron to her face. It wasn’t a big smile, it didn’t pull at her face or leave dimples on her cheeks, but it brightened the room in a way Ray never had. She was warm, radiant, and Ray felt her glow like the morning sunlight at dawn, breaking through the night with the promise of a new day.

Josten said something and it drew Ray out of her head, but she didn’t catch her words.

“What.” She didn’t phrase it like a question.

“I said I fixed your monstrosity,” Josten said, pointing to the quesadillas with her spatula. “Were you seriously not planning on adding some kind of sauce? It would have been so dry.”

Ray shrugged. For the most part, she ate to keep herself alive and the only flavours she could really taste were sweet and spicy. And she didn’t think she could live long off chocolate quesadillas. Nicky had exclusively bought vegetables for a month after the last time she tried, which Ray hadn’t particularly cared about but Aaron had complained vocally and loudly the entire time.

“Fuck off, Josten,” Ray said as she walked over and carried the plates to the tiny kitchen table. Only one of the chairs was clear of stacked books so Ray claimed that one and left the other for Josten to sort out.

“Talia.” When Ray looked up, Josten was still standing by the stove. “My name’s Talia.”

Ray leaned back in her chair. “Last I checked your name’s Josten, too.”

Ray watched as she stepped forward and pulled out the other chair. It was facing the wall, but there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen to have two chairs facing each other. She had to move the stack of books onto the table to sit down.

“Josten is the last name my mom chose for me when we were hiding from my father,” she said, looking down at her plate and picking at a stray piece of lettuce that had fallen from her quesadilla. “I didn’t see the point in changing it when I eventually got legal papers from the FBI, and it felt like the last thing I had left of her. Talia was something I chose for myself. I was named after my father, but I cut out his name from mine and Talia was what remained. It was everything I had when I wasn’t my father’s daughter. I am nothing, and I will always be nothing, but I have a name.”

She turned to Ray then, and the sunlight spilling in from the kitchen window behind her lit a halo around her curls. She was inexplicably beautiful, and so painfully unobtainable that it eased a familiar ache into her chest.

Ray ripped off a piece of her quesadilla, and pesto burst into her mouth as she chewed. She wiped her lips with her thumb and sucked her thumb into her mouth to lick it off, but then found that Talia was watching her again. When Ray looked up, Talia held her gaze. Ray put her hand down and regarded Talia with what she hoped was detached curiosity. She didn’t know which of them would break first; Talia’s temper sparked like wildfire when she was pissed off, but she possessed a patience to rival Renee’s at times, even if, more often than not, it stemmed from stubbornness. Ray didn’t know what to do with that kind of dichotomy, and she didn’t know which way Talia would swing this time.

She didn’t like the turn of her thoughts, and opted for a distraction. “Why were you running from your father?”

Talia didn’t flinch at the question. She didn’t buckle or cower; she steeled herself. Ray didn’t know whether it was Ray she found threatening, or the memories that were bound to surface.

“My father was not a good man,” Talia said. “He worked for the yakuza as a hit-man until he was arrested for tax evasion and the FBI then found enough evidence to put him away for life. Before that though, he used all of his resources to track me and my mom down because of the money we’d stolen from him. Turned out that money wasn’t his and he was eager to pay his employers back.”

“I don’t think it was the money,” Ray said, and elaborated at Talia’s questioning look: “Why they chased you for so long. I imagine that at some point they realised it was better to hurt you than to recoup anything they’d lost.”

To Ray’s surprise, Talia smiled at that. A sly, secretive smile that disquieted Ray to her core. “What.”

“Some people might interpret that as a thinly veiled threat,” Talia said.

Ray hummed. “And you?”

Talia looked down at her shirt as she smoothed down the front again. “I think you like me too much to hurt me.”

Ray didn’t know where Talia had gotten that idea, and she couldn’t let her keep it for long. “I hate you,” she corrected, keeping her voice bored and unconcerned. She ripped another piece off the quesadilla as she considered her next words. “Ninety percent of the time the very sight of you makes me want to commit murder.”

Talia was as bold as she was stupid. “What about the other ten?”

Ray ignored the flashes of daydreams and memories weaving into one combobulation of a pipedream. If Talia presumed Ray to be something she was not, that was Talia’s problem, not hers. It wasn’t Ray’s problem if Talia thought she was bluffing.

She ignored the question about the other ten percent, because though she knew herself to be self-destructive, she wasn’t stupid. “I would have thought someone with your qualifications would know how proportions and probability works. Your priorities need restructuring.”

“Sure,” Talia allowed. “But I don’t mind that I incite your murderous instincts. You didn’t say whether it was going to be me you were going to kill, or whether you’d target someone else.”

Ray kept her expression blank through practice and willpower. She wasn’t going to let Talia see her unruffled from a few choice words. “Then let me reiterate,” she started, taking out a cigarette from the box she’d bought last week when she didn’t have her bag of tobacco on her. “Ninety percent of the time I think about carving the skin from your body and hanging it out as a warning to every other fool who thinks she can figure me out.”

She lit the cigarette and let the first drag burn her throat and smother the thought of letting her rage spill free. It wouldn’t do any good to let it out; Talia knew too much already and Ray didn’t have the energy to pick up the pieces left behind. Ray had made her hatred explicit, and all Talia had to do was run as she was so apt to do. It was in her blood, and it was something Ray knew how to exploit.

But then Talia leaned over and snatched the cigarette from between Ray’s fingers and brought it to her own mouth. She took a drag, and Ray imagined that she was inhaling that smothered rage and sharing its burden. Ray forced that thought away and focused on getting out a second cigarette. She knew Talia was studying her, likely focused on her blank expression and calm tone despite her earlier words, but Ray found herself uncaring. It wasn’t the same form of uncaring that Ray felt about most things; it wasn’t the unchanging grey of the world, or the viscous fog that drowned every possible emotion Bee encouraged her to feel. It was a quiet sort of acceptance. A tranquil state in the eye of a storm. Talia was looking at her, aligning puzzle pieces until she found some ugly picture of the truth, and Ray didn’t mind.

“Good,” Talia said. “I want to see you lose control.”

Ray went still with the flame of her lighter half an inch from her cigarette. She made it look purposeful by lowering her lighter and taking out the cigarette from between her lips, but she didn’t think her stumble went unnoticed.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Ray asked in a bored tone.

Talia opened her mouth to argue, froze, and then pushed up her sleeve over her watch to check the time. “Shit.”

Ray left their plates on the table and the pan beside the stove as she followed Talia out of her apartment at a leisurely pace to Talia’s rushed steps. She locked her building’s front door behind her, and watched Talia’s back slowly getting smaller and smaller as she ran back to campus, as she ran away from Ray. If this were one of Ray’s books, she would have made a pencilled note about potential foreshadowing. But this was real life, so foreseeing the ending didn’t change anything. It was a good thing that Talia meant nothing to her, that she was nothing.

There was no _this._

* * *

**H** alfway back to campus, Ray’s phone started vibrating in her back pocket. She fished it out unhurriedly—because Kevin never could manage for long on his own—but her hand froze when she flipped it open and saw the name on the screen in pixelated green. _Aaron._ Bee had asked her before what she would do if Aaron ever tried to reach out, and Ray had developed a plan, but she was so frozen with surprise that she almost let it ring out. Eventually her thumb stumbled across the keypad and she pressed ACCEPT.

She held the phone to her ear, standing still in the middle of a busy street and ignoring the mutterings of passersby as she blocked their path. She tried to say his name, to offer some form of greeting so that she wouldn’t ruin the only chance of reconciliation, but the words died in her throat.

“Hi,” Aaron said. His voice hadn’t changed, but Ray wasn’t sure why she expected it to. He lived in Chicago with Katelyn, but he’d always have that California drawl and South Carolina idioms. Ray waited for him to say something else, to explain why he’d reached out after four years of silence. When he realised Ray wasn’t going to say hello back, Aaron sighed and Ray almost felt it against her face.

“There’s a new astronomy documentary on Netflix,” he said hesitantly.

Ray let her thoughts drift to the stars, and wondered which constellations had aligned in the sky for this moment to exist. In how many other universes did this moment occur? Which external being had observed this wave function and separated this reality from the smear? Was some god out there laughing at how long Ray had missed her brother, taunting her for the years of miscommunication? The road to hell was paved with good intentions, but so was the road to misery. Pollux had asked to share his immortality with Castor to keep them together, but perhaps in one universe Castor had said no. Perhaps for Castor there were too many stars between them, too many years separating them. Perhaps Pollux had asked to share his immortality with his twin when all Castor wanted was to be mortal and live his life on Earth.

“Sounds boring,” Ray said, but continued before Aaron could hang up and close that door forever. “Tomorrow?”

* * *

**R** ay managed to sneak in the back of the auditorium while Talia was plugging in a borrowed laptop to the projector. The room wasn’t full by any means, but if Ray slumped down in her chair she doubted that Talia would notice her.

The powerpoint was set up quickly—mostly because Talia left it to the I.T. tech rather than trying to fiddle with everything like most lecturers did—and Talia started her presentation. Now that Ray knew more about Talia’s past, it was easier to place a smothered Baltimore accent and a few phrases that Ray had only come across in books written by British authors.

Talia stuck to the script she’d been reciting non-stop for the past week, only occasionally missing out a few details before reiterating the main point and adding in the missed details after. When Ray looked around, the audience seemed engrossed, writing down a few notes but otherwise focused on Talia. Everything seemed to be running smoothly until Talia got to the third part of her talk. Talia had already told Ray how important this part was, the key component that linked everything together.

She brought up, as planned, the comparison of Johannes Kepler’s questioning of why the Sun was ninety-three million miles away from Earth. She explained why this question hadn’t been the right question to ask; the Earth was not the centrepoint of the universe. It wasn’t that the Sun was ninety-three million miles away from the Earth, it was that the Earth—and all its life forms—was ninety-three million miles away from the Sun. She explained that this was the sort of approach to use for dark energy in the universe; that the reason this universe has the amount of dark energy it does doesn’t matter—we only ask because it’s the particular amount of dark energy needed for hospitable life conditions.

Talia then talked about how dark energy was simply the byproduct of the mechanism that created the universe: the Big Bang. She explained how inflationary cosmology gives insight into what would have powered the Bang itself, identifying a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space. The fuel was based on a quantum field, and that it’s so efficient that it’s virtually impossible to use it all up. With inflationary theory, this means that the Big Bang creating our universe was likely not a one-time event. She suggested that the fuel that generated our Big Bang would also generate countless other Big Bangs, each kick-starting their own separate universes.

She talked about how this could intertwine with string theory, about how each of these universes would have extra dimensions taking on a wide variety of different shapes. Humanity found itself in this particular universe simply because it was the only universe that had the same physical features, such as this specific amount of dark energy, that were compatible with our form of life to take hold.

But she missed the part about whether the existence of other universes could ever be confirmed, and how inflationary theory could be observed now and in the future. It was the parts that brought Talia’s research out of the limitations of the theoretical. It made it tangible and real.

Talia knew that she’d forgotten those parts, because when she started her conclusion, she paused a breath too long and neatly excised the few lines that were only relevant if she’d reiterated that it could be possible to observe the multiverse. When the clapping died down, Talia asked if anyone had any questions.

Ray waited while a few of the students asked questions about Talia’s research, referencing theories Ray had never heard of to reach conclusions using logic she couldn’t understand. Talia did, though, and answered them with such fervour Ray wondered whether she had been any help with Talia’s presentation at all.

But then no one else seemed to raise their hand or speak up so Ray did. She stayed slouched down in her seat but she knew that when Talia recognised her as soon as she saw the black arm band.

“Yes?” Talia asked after a moment of surprise.

“Do you think we can ever confirm the existence of other universes?” Ray asked.

Even from across several rows of chairs, Ray could see the relief and gratitude in Talia’s expression. Ray wanted to push Talia’s face away so she didn’t have to see it, but she was too far away. Instead she just pushed down her discomfort and awaited her answer.

“I think it’s hard to imagine, but it is possible,” Talia said. “Inflationary theory already has strong observational support. The theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded, tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world, yielding a distinctive fingerprint. It would mean a pattern of slightly hotter and colder spots across space, which powerful telescopes have observed. If we consider other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide with one another. If our universe got hit by another, that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of the temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect. The multiverse can seem a little farfetched at times, but it might one day be grounded in observations.”

Ray only nodded, since she already knew this from Talia’s near-constant practicing, and Talia turned back to her students to see if anyone else had further questions. They didn’t, and the room slowly began to empty. Talia turned off the projector and unplugged her USB from the laptop, and eventually she and Ray were the only two left in the auditorium. It seemed such a vast space now, and both seemed hesitant to break the careful silence.

It was Talia that broke it first.

“Thank you,” she said. “For asking me that.”

Ray shrugged, but Talia didn’t seem content to leave it at that.

“I’m serious. I’m taking this research further. I told my supervisor last week and she’s supportive of my change in direction. I needed to put in that part in my presentation so I could make my research seem worthwhile. Otherwise it’s all just what-ifs and maybes. I needed it to be real. You made it real.”

Ray didn’t understand how Talia could make such a small thing seem so important. “It was nothing. Stop pretending I did something that I did not.”

“I’m not,” Talia insisted. “I didn’t ask you to do that and I didn’t offer anything in exchange. You just helped me because you wanted to and I can’t pretend that that doesn’t mean something to me. You talk about yourself as if you’re someone who doesn’t care about anything or anyone, and you’re good at pretending that that is who you are but it’s not. I know I believed it at first but I _know_ you now. You’re not this hard shell with emptiness inside—”

“I am _not_ soft,” Ray interrupted. She tried to keep her tone calm but failed. She knew that bottomless rage within had leaked into her voice but Talia didn’t flinch at the coldness of it.

“No,” she agreed. “But you’re not empty.” She stepped closer, dangerously close, but she didn’t touch Ray. There was enough room for Ray to step back, every escape root if Ray needed to take it, but she didn’t. She let Talia into her space and she didn’t feel threatened by the intrusion.

“You’re not just a shell,” Talia continued. “You are solid, and strong, and sturdy. You’re like the Earth, with a gravitational field that pushes some people away and pulls some people in. And it’s like no matter what I throw at you, no matter what truths I reveal about myself, you don’t run away. You just accept it without flinching and I’ve never met someone like you before.” She paused, chewing on her lip as she thought and Ray wanted to pull it out from between her teeth to get her to stop, but before she had the chance Talia spoke again: “And you care.” She said this like it conveyed the complexity of what made Ray herself. “You care about Kevin, you care about your brother and your cousin. You care about Renee and her girlfriend—”

Ray grimached at the mention of Allison. “Renee should have better taste.”

Talia smiled. “You care enough to have expectations for her.”

Ray didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t think of a workaround or justification. “What did I tell you about trying to figure me out?” she asked instead.

“You said you’d carve my skin from my body and hang it as a warning to other people, but you didn’t tell me to stop.”

“It was implied.”

“I’m stupid, remember? I need things spelled out.”

“Shut up.”

“Am I at ninety-one yet? Or does this percentage increase exponentially?”

“I’m not a math problem.”

“But I’ll still solve you.”

“No one asked you,” Ray said, and then caught Talia’s face between her palms and leaned in.

Talia didn’t react instantaneously. She didn’t kiss Ray back but when Ray leaned away and let Talia go, Talia’s stupor seemed to break and she leaned back into Ray’s space.

“That isn’t a yes,” Ray said, putting her hands on Talia’s shoulders to keep her at a distance. She hated how quiet her voice sounded. She wanted a cigarette, but she had left her tobacco and rolling paper in her office and her box of cigarettes were still on her kitchen table. She should have known she would need one. _She should have known better than to kiss Talia. Talia hadn’t said yes. Ray hadn’t even asked. She wouldn’t be like them, she wouldn’t be like them, she wouldn’t be—_

“So ask me,” Talia said, and if Ray’s voice had been quiet, Talia sounded breathless.

Ray raised one of her hands and curled it around Talia’s jaw, keeping her fingertips clear of her hair. She leaned in close, so that barely an inch was left between them. They breathed the same air until Ray asked, “Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Talia said, and waited for Ray to move.

Now that Ray had some semblance of control back, she stayed where she was and said, “Keep your hands to yourself.”

She expected Talia to just nod, but instead she moved her hands—carefully enough to not brush against Ray—to put them in the front pockets of her jeans. Remembering that she was wearing the only nice pair of jeans she likely owned, she realised she couldn’t get much more than her fingers in the pockets. Ray waited while Talia then put her hands behind her back.

“Comfortable?” Ray asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Not yet,” Talia said, inching her face toward Ray in challenge.

“Ninety-one percent,” Ray said, “going on ninety-two.”

At that, Talia grinned, and the only way Ray could think to wipe that smirk off her face was to kiss it off.

* * *

**D** ays turned into weeks turned into months, and Ray still felt like she was waiting for the ball to drop. The day of Talia’s presentation hadn’t been the last time they kissed, but Ray still knew it wasn’t going to be something she could keep. Still, she kept asking and Talia kept saying yes. For the most part, their lives hadn’t changed. They still spent most of their days in their office, working on their separate research, sending each other taunts on the radio. But they drank coffee together in the morning and in the evening Ray would make hot chocolate and Talia would make hot tea. When they weren’t in their office, Ray would invite Talia over to her apartment and sometimes they watched movies with takeout and sometimes they cooked dinner together. As the days got progressively warmer they sat outside with their books and despite the high-factor sun cream they both wore, Ray was the only one who came back inside pink and overheated. Sometimes she let Talia apply the aftersun lotion on her face and arms and sometimes she didn’t. Talia seemed grateful to be given the opportunity to ask, and never complained or seemed frustrated when Ray said no.

Ray hadn’t realised she had been counting down for it all to be over until one Monday in August when Ray was sat on the windowsill in their office. Talia—sitting on the floor beside the window and resting her head on Ray’s thigh—had pulled the keyboard, mouse, and screen off the desk and set it beside her, with the leads draped across the office floor. It looked like the whole system would shut down if she budged it any further from the intranet port and the computer box, but Talia still refused to buy a laptop. Ray chose not to point out that Talia didn’t have to sit with her. She was perfectly capable of smoking a cigarette without Talia at her side, but she could admit to herself that the weight of her was surprisingly comfortable. When Talia asked if she could sit with her by the windowsill, Ray granted her that moment’s indulgence and thought she could take a longer cigarette break than initially planned.

The sounds of summer sighed and murmured at the window, but inside their office the cool air was quiet until Talia’s computer pinged with an email alert. Ray hadn’t thought anything of it until she felt Talia tense up. Ray nudged Talia’s shoulder with her knee.

“Sorry,” Talia said, lifting her head from Ray’s thigh and misinterpreting Ray’s silent demand for an explanation. Ray made a noise of discontent—though if questioned she would deny it until she was blue in the face—and Talia looked over her shoulder at Ray. She scrutinised her expression as Ray stared at the wall ahead of her, and then set her head back down on Ray’s thigh.

“What was the email?” Ray asked.

Talia didn’t answer immediately. Ray shifted her gaze back down to Talia but couldn’t see much of her expression from above. Still, she waited for Talia to piece together some form of response. Ray would just have to figure out whether it were the truth or not.

“The Ramanujan Building’s reopening next week,” Talia said. “Right on schedule.”

She didn’t sound particularly happy about it, and Ray knew that it was because she didn’t want to have _that_ conversation with Ray. Ray knew that what they were doing meant nothing, was nothing, and that it was just a matter of convenience. She could either let Talia stew in discomfort, or cut to the chase. It was smarter to do the latter, for her own sake.

So she said, with a blank face and an unaffected tone, “A week will be plenty of time to box up your two possessions.”

She expected Talia to loosen up a little, a small sigh of relief. Instead, her shoulders remained tense and still.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked quietly.

Ray took another drag of her cigarette to give her time to formulate her response. She hadn’t expected Talia to need Ray to give her such explicit permission to leave. She decided to ignore the question and ask one of her own. “What’s the alternative?”

Talia moved her keyboard from her lap and turned around to face her. The denim pattern of Ray’s jeans were imprinted on Talia’s left cheek, but it would fade as fast as Talia’s memories of the last eight months. Ray would remain some anecdote in a story about Talia’s time at PSU, a brief story about the woman she shared an office with when planning her research on the multiverse. In the books she would publish, there would be chapters upon chapters of possible universes out there, and perhaps one of these universes contained a world where Talia Josten and Ray Minyard’s story didn’t end here.

“If you want me to leave, I’ll go,” Talia said. “But I want to stay. I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to lose you.”

Ray almost told Talia to stop being so dramatic, that switching offices didn’t mean anything, but it had been what Ray had assumed too. If their ‘this’, as Talia called it, continued despite Talia moving back to the Ramanujan Building, then neither of them could call it a matter of convenience. It would mean that Ray could no longer deny its significance, that it meant something. That Talia meant something.

Ray held Talia’s gaze for a moment longer, seeing the warring hope and resolve in her eyes. Ray didn’t understand how a woman who had been through so much still had the capacity to hope.

“You better not complain about your classes being on the other side of campus as soon as it starts raining,” Ray said.

It took Talia a second to hear the ‘yes’, and when she did, a grin broke out across her face. Ray saw a multiverse of possibilities in her eyes. Maybe in another world, Talia Josten and Ray Minyard’s story did end there. Maybe they still found themselves pulled back together, through some cosmic interference that Ray didn’t understand but perhaps Talia knew some equation that could explain it.

Talia rested her head once more on Ray’s thigh and exhaled a breath of contentment, and Ray supposed that she didn’t much care about the other universes when she could live in this one.

**Author's Note:**

> **  
>  REFERENCES   
>  **
>
>> Ray’s password is from Margaret Atwood’s _Variations on the Word Love_ which can be found [here](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/variations-on-the-word-love/)
>> 
>> The quote about poetry standing in opposition to numbness is from Garth Greenwell’s interview with poet Ilya  
> Kaminsky which can be found [here](https://www.pw.org/content/still_dancing_an_interview_with_ilya_kaminsky)
>> 
>> The definition of poetry in Ray’s thesis is from India Gonzalez’s interview with Kiki Petrosino found [here](https://www.pw.org/content/between_worlds_a_qa_with_poet_kiki_petrosino)
>> 
>> Talia’s presentation is from Brian Greene’s TED Talks on the multiverse and string theory found [here](https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_is_our_universe_the_only_universe) and [here](https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_making_sense_of_string_theory)
>> 
>> The epilogue was inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s _A Moment’s Indulgence_ and Ray’s narration makes a few references to the poem. It can be found [here](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-moments-indulgence/)
> 
> the art in this fic is by me and ~~if you want to help me out and reblog it 'cause tumblr refused to add it to the aftg tag~~ you can find it [here](https://wishbonetea.tumblr.com/post/621292321808498688/me-you-and-the-multiverse-for-the-aftgexchange)
> 
> i made a moodboard for this fic which can be found [here](https://wishbonetea.tumblr.com/post/620015686947913728/%F0%9D%90%A9%F0%9D%90%AB%F0%9D%90%A8%F0%9D%90%A6%F0%9D%90%A9%F0%9D%90%AD%F0%9D%90%AC-college-au-dance-au-genderbend-au-ray)
> 
> thank you for reading!
> 
> added note to anyone reading this from september 2020 onwards: there's an incredible video of a drag queen (Amrou Al-Kadhi / Glamrou) explaining non-binary identities with quantum physics and if i had discovered it sooner i would have probably referenced it but alas i was a few months late. anyway i fully recommend watching it, so [here's](https://wishbonetea.tumblr.com/post/629276798770921472/fallenfromgrace-naamahdarling) a link to the clip i found on tumblr (though if anyone can find the full video please link it to me in the comments!) As a side note, Amrou Al-Kadhi released a book last year called _Unicorn_ about their experiences as a muslim drag queen and I fully recommend checking that out!
> 
> as part of the AFTG fall exchange @[makebelieveanything](https://makebelieveanything.tumblr.com/) wrote a companion piece to this fic and it's so so good! you can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26452240)


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